Strategy-to-pixels
Issue 271: Full stack influence in an age of agency
Ages ago, when I was an Individual Contributor, I kept telling people I wanted to be “more strategic.” It sounded mature, like I was ready for a bigger challenge. The problem was, I didn’t really know what that meant. Did being strategic mean doing more research? Writing better briefs? Making recommendations about what others should do? For a while, that’s what I thought—until I realized I was describing consulting, not strategy. I wasn’t looking to advise; I wanted to shape what got built.
What I really meant was that I wanted to do something beyond pushing pixels. But I’ve since learned that being “beyond the pixels” doesn’t mean being above them. The truth is, not only are you still responsible for the pixels and lines of code you ship, being strategic means you are also responsible for the output and outcome of others.
The age of high agency
For a long time, strategy was treated as something separate from the work itself. It lived in decks and memos, stretched across quarters, and was mostly discussed in meetings rather than expressed through the product. Strategy meant having a plan—a north star, a roadmap, a framework.
But that model no longer fits how most creative and technical work actually happens. The iteration cycle has collapsed. Decisions that used to take a quarter now happen daily. Companies that once ran QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews) now need to run DBRs (Daily Business Reviews).
This shift isn’t just about speed; it’s about agency. In the old model, strategy belonged to the people “upstream,” and everyone else was executing someone else’s plan. Now the people doing the work are the ones setting direction. As my former colleague Gian Segato1 wrote in Agency Is Eating the World, the ability to act has overtaken the need to theorize. Founder mode is back, not just for founders, but for anyone willing to take ownership—Operator Mode.
When teams have that level of autonomy, strategy stops being a noun and becomes a verb. It’s less about deciding what should happen, and more about shaping what does.
A strategy enables you to act
There’s a line from Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines: “We have a strategy. It’s called doing things.” I think about that often. A strategy that doesn’t lead to action isn’t a strategy—it’s a sentiment. The best strategic thinkers I’ve worked with aren’t the ones who write the cleverest plans; they’re the ones who keep the team moving. They make the next decision, even when it’s imperfect.
One of my favorite talks is The Secret Truth About Executing Great Ideas. The talk by Frans Johanssonon, author of The Medici Effect, he drops wisdom with one phase in the talk, “A strategy enables you to act.” The perception of strategy is that it needs to be verbose and long-winded in six page docs. In reality, it can be a simplified approach to getting from Point A to Point B. The gap between deciding and doing is where most organizations stall. Great teams close that gap by building momentum into their process and treating each action as a form of strategic validation. You find direction through doing and learning.
Strategic is executing your craft at scale
The biggest misconception about strategy is that it means stepping away from the craft. In reality, being strategic in your craft means learning how to scale it. For designers, this doesn’t mean knowing only the screens you designed—it means understanding the decisions behind every other team’s screens, too. It’s knowing how the mobile app connects to the marketing site, or why a component behaves differently in one surface versus another. Strategic designers don’t just make pixels; they steward consistency and coherence across an ecosystem.
For engineers, strategy shows up as architectural awareness. You know how the codebase for one product influences another, or how an internal API decision shapes the long-term velocity of the entire organization. You start to see how the health of the system depends on invisible decisions—naming conventions, data models, deployment timing.
That’s what scaling craft looks like. You’re still hands-on, but your hands reach further. You start seeing patterns that others miss, because your vantage point has widened. Strategy is not a departure from craft; it’s craft that has accumulated responsibility.
Ownership and agency are what make that possible. Once you begin treating every project like it’s your own business, your scope expands naturally. You start caring about dependencies, budgets, latency, and customer impact—not because someone told you to, but because the work feels like yours. That’s how strategy enters the room: not through title or tenure, but through care.
The shape of orgs
As the line between strategy and execution blurs, the structure of teams begins to change. Levels and titles matter less than leverage. What matters is the number of surfaces your decisions influence.
I’ve found that the most impactful designers and engineers are the ones who move fluidly between strategy and shipping. They can have a conversation with leadership about product direction and then open the file or IDE to show what that actually looks like.
This blend of agency and capability is becoming the new normal. The most influential people don’t wait on dependencies—they destroy them, either by taking on the work themselves or by building enough trust to unblock others. They’re not just makers; they’re builders.
This is the quiet shift happening in modern organizations: strategy is no longer a function. It’s a behavior.
From talkers to doers
A strategy, at its core, is the approach you take to reach an outcome. It’s how you decide what matters, what can wait, and what you’re willing to trade off. Most of the time, strategy is expressed not in documents but in the choices teams make when no one is watching.
As Jehad Affoneh says, “Demo before the memo”—prove it first. A prototype speaks louder than a proposal because it shows commitment. It’s not hypothetical—it’s a signal that you’ve invested energy to move something forward.
That’s the spirit of strategy-to-pixels. The people who can turn intent into output—who can think and make in the same motion—are the ones defining the future of craft. It doesn’t matter if you’re an individual contributor or manager; both need to be able to do this. In this new landscape, ownership is strategy, and agency is the new org chart.
Strategy-to-pixels favors the doers, not the talkers.
Hyperlinks + notes
I’m reading AI Engineering by Chip Huyen, who was recently on Lenny’s Podcast
The AI-powered Stream Ring is designed for on-the-fly voice notes
Strategy is compressing
“Strategy” is one of those loaded words. I often hear people say, “I want to do more strategy,” especially when talking about career growth. But what does that even mean? “Strategist” feels like one of those titles we should retire—kind of like the “Ideas Guy” before it.
We worked together at Replit
Appreciate this piece, David. You capture the power of agency—but I think the real opportunity is connecting that agency to long-horizon strategy. Strategy isn’t just fast execution; it’s the deliberate configuration of choices and trade-offs that give those daily actions meaning. Engineers and Designers belong in that conversation to surface the horizon opportunities no one else can see.